Educational Curriculum to Improve Clinical Outcomes in Diabetes Mellitus Patients: A Systematic Review

Diabetes Mellitus (DM) cannot be treated and controlled with only medicine because there is also a need to provide education to the patients. This is to help them adhere to treatment, adopt healthy lifestyles, and prevent complications that can cause death. Therefore, this systematic review aims to determine the curriculum or content of educational materials that needs to be given to DM patients to improve the achievement of clinical outcomes. Sage, Scient direct, and Pubmed were explored for relevant articles published between 2012 and 2022 using multiple search terms. STROBE tools were used to conduct quality assessments, after which a narrative synthesis of the findings was performed, and 1.619 citations were obtained. After deduplicating and screening, 18 studies were eligible for inclusion. The educational materials given were related to diet/nutrition (n=17), physical activity (n=15), DM treatment (n=14), complications and risk factors (n= 13), goal setting or Healthy Living with DM (n=13), monitoring blood glucose levels parameters (n=11), description of DM (n=7), mental health (n=5), and foot care DM (n= 4). A total of 18 articles in this systematic review study met the quality criteria based on an assessment using the STROBE checklist to minimize bias. The results showed that educational materials provided to DM patients can improve clinical outcomes. However, the evidence base for educating people with the disease in the community is still limited, and further studies are needed.